There is a stat that I find somehow totally unexpected, even though I’d have guessed it right if you asked me beforehand: the highest-grossing baseball movie in history is A League of Their Own, the story of the first season of the short-lived All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, founded during World War II as a […]
It’s rare, and in a weird way even kind of special, to see a film do so much in such a narrow way to sabotage itself as The Book of Life does. The second theatrical feature created at Reel FX Animation Studios – better in every describable regard than their first film, last autumn’s atrocious […]
There is nothing small about Christopher Nolan’s newest, longest film, the epic space drama Interstellar. Its strengths are as gargantuan and overpowering as its mighty flaws, and just as impossible to miss. I have absolutely no idea whether I liked it as a work of cinema, but I know this much for a dead certainty: […]
Let us consider the curious case of Kathryn Bigelow. She is, arguably, contemporary Hollywood’s most important female director, at least as measured by her directorial Oscar win in 2009, the only such victory by a woman. And she has acquired this status while being among the very few major woman filmmakers to completely (and, to […]
(Part 2 of 2. Be sure to check out the companion review!) The Forbidden Dance made less than half of what the Warner-released Cannon production Lambada made their shared opening weekend; but we are speaking in terms of the purest relativism. Lambada still opened in eighth place and made less than one-fifth of that weekend’s […]
(Part 1 of 2. Be sure to check out the companion review!) My Hollywood Century project has, I confess, been subjected to some mission drift over the last twenty-odd entries. I described it, at the start, as: Sometimes it will be a well-loved consensus classic, and sometimes a lost masterpiece. Sometimes an ill-made but important […]
History remembers 1953’s House of Wax as the first big studio film shot in 3-D during that gimmick’s earliest incarnation. History remembers this so well, in fact, that history tends to overlook that House of Wax has perhaps even more significant a claim to fame: it was more or less the movie that first linked […]
